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Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could
charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The
personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If
I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not
have been able to build my own computers anyway.

He also details examples of how difficult it was to start a new service
the way the telephone system used to be,
how radio used to all be freely receivable,
and how cable TV is mis-regulated.
He summarizes his case:

I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the
country. When I’m asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open
truth. When I was first asked to “sign on” with some good people
interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic
system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the
other hand, I’m a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals
and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time
and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or
control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I
speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

Then he asks for all that not to happen to the Internet:

We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking
out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still
wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one
of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most
momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times
in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents
the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is
good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the
FCC itself.

73 Democratic members of Congress signed
a letter
drafted by telco and cableco lobbyists against net neutrality.
Save the Internet has sufficiently fisked it.
My favorite point is that when AT&T was required as a condition
of acquiring Bellsouth in 2006 to abide by net neutrality,
it increased its infrastructure investments.
As soon as that two year requirement was up,
so were the investments.
(And they didn’t even honor all the requirements,
such as
a low-end $10/month service.)

We can let the telcos and cablecos continue to turn the Internet into cable TV,
as they have said they want to do.
Under the conditions they want, we never would have had the
world wide web, google, YouTube, flickr, facebook, etc.

And left to their plan, the duopoly will continue
cherry-picking densely-populated areas and
leaving rural areas,
such as south Georgia, where I live, to sink or swim.
Most of the white area in the Georgia map never had anybody even
try a speed test.
Most of the rest of south Georgia had really slow access.
Which maybe wouldn’t be a problem if we had competitive newspapers
(we don’t) or competing TV stations (we don’t).
Or if we didn’t need to publish public information like health care
details online, as Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) says he plans to do.
How many people in his district can even get to it?
How many won’t because their link is too slow?
How many could but won’t because it costs too much?

John Barrow (D GA-12) has
a fancy flashy home page that most people in his district probably can’t get to.
Yet he signed the letter against net neutrality.

Question from a provider: VoIP traffic prioritization from essentially our own service?

Moderator: One thing that won’t be allowed is prioritizing your own service
over someone else’s similar service; that’s almost the whole point.
FCC person: This is contemplated in the document. Existing services
wouldn’t have to be reworked rapidly.
Seeking input.
Reasons to be concerned.
Monopoly over last mile has a position to differentially treat such a service.
This is one of the core concerns.

Q: Giving the same priority to somebody else’s similar VoIP service
is essentially creating a trust relationship; how much traffic
will the other service provider send?
Continue reading →

The subtitle is The Regulators Meet the Operators, at NANOG 48, Austin, Texas, 22 Feb 2010.
The ground rules of the panel are that it’s not about politics or policy.
It assumes there will be net neutrality, and it’s about getting
actual network engineers and architects involved in implementing it.
Prior reading: pages 41-51 of the
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).
I’d actually recommend starting at page 37, which is where the NPRM
discusses codifying the existing four Internet principles (see below).

A huge number of comments have been received already, by Jan 15 deadline.
More comments are solicited.
See also openinternet.gov.

The general idea is to take six proposed principles and turn them into
rules that are enforceable and not unreasonable:

Proposed Rules: 6 Principles

Access to Content

Access to Applications and Services

Connect Devices to the Internet

Access to Competition

Nondiscrimination

Transparency

The first four principles have been around for several years.
The last two, nondiscrimination and transparency, are
the same as the ones Scott Bradner’s petition
recommended back in June 2009.
Back then I mentioned as I always do that the FCC could also stop
talking about consumers and talk about participants.
Interestingly, their slide at this talk did not use the word “consumer”,
so maybe they’ve gotten to that point, too.

The FCC is also making a distinction between broadband and Internet.
There are existing rules regarding “managed” vs. “specialized services”
for broadband Internet access, but for net neutrality in general,
maybe different rules are needed.
Continue reading →

Dave Farber posted a
response by Chris Yoo to Barb Cherry’s post about myths and historical
errors.
Here’s Chris’s reponse in full.
To me, it seems that he is conceding that she’s right about the
history, that antitrust says nothing about ISP competition,
and that a few ISPs control most of the Internet in the U.S.
But read it for yourself:

From: Christopher S. Yoo [mailto:csyoo@law.upenn.edu]

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the history of common carriage
regulation. Barbara has spent far more time thinking about this than I
have, so I always appreciate hearing her reactions and learn from
reading her work. That said, here are a few thoughts.

It is true that common carriage long predates both the Granger Movement
and the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. That said, one of the central
problems is that the historic justifications for common carriage have
not aged very well. Often times the common carriage obligations were
regarded as a quid pro quo for a government grant of some economic
privilege. Other times they were justified because the industry was
“affected with a public interest,” a concept that is usually traced to
the landmark Supreme Court case Munn v. Illinois (1876). The Supreme
Court struggled to imbue that standard with content (along with a number
of early treatises trying to make sense of the concept) and would
ultimately abandon it as analytically empty in Nebbia v. New York
(1934). Legal scholars, such as Thomas Nachbar and James Speta in
addition to Barbara, have attempted to recover lessons from this era. I
have never spoken to Barbara about this in particular, but both Tom and
Jim have noted the difficulty in extracting any useful lessons from the
history.

David P. Reed asks a question and Christopher S. Yoo responds
on Farber’s Interesting People list.
I’m posting both in full here,
with my thoughts at the end;
basically, law isn’t a science, and anecdotes can turn into
legal cases; some have already regarding net neutrality.

From: David P. Reed [dpreed@reed.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:50 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] re-distribution of op-ed on Net Neutrality — a reaction and a reply from one of the authors

I read through the long comment by Chris Yoo below, and as a non-lawyer
interested in policy, I ask the following simple question:

Is there a well-regarded (one might ask for scientifically reasoned)
argument that antitrust law as currently interpreted and practiced has a
substantial impact measured in some currency like $ on social welfare?

Otherwise this entire argument is about nothing more than vaporware
proceeding from a faith that competition (however loosely defined)
creates social welfare best. AFAIK, this is largely an article of
faith, just as the “End of History” was a grand article of faith posited
by many of the same people as “truth”.

It is just not fair to imply that the core of “today’s settled antitrust
law” carries even the level of weight as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
There have been no replicable studies of its practice.

Law professors and lawyers who don’t challenge its truthiness squarely
are merely behaving as dogmatic mandarins always do – asserting
authority of professional status, rather than rigor of reasoning,
experiment, or argument.

I say this not as FOX News or Hillary Clinton would call an elitist, but
as a person who genuinely is unconvinced by magical faith in
authorities.

Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and cable research company CableLabs were all invited to participate several weeks ago, but declined, Martin said. The commission again reached out to Comcast after the announcement this week that it would develop a P2P bill of rights with Pando Networks, but they again sent their regrets, he said.